John Markoff

(These are loose, John went fairly deep into the three stories.)

Want to tell three stories that were under appreciated by my editors. I think I’m the longest surviving technology reporter in Silicon Valley. Peter Kerry is at the Merc and one of my heroes, but he’s mostly an investigative reporter. Went to school with William Hewlett Jr., grew up in Palo Alto. Was the paper boy at the house where Steve Jobs lives now. A few years ago Larry Page moved in the hacienda behind my mother’s house. One coda to the pretexting HP scandal, which is using social engineering techniques to find out what numbers you’ve called, I’ve never been a privacy stickler, but what really pissed me off was that Jay Keyworth (is that right?) was talking to 8 other reporters and not just to me.

About 5 months ago my wife tried to pay her phone bill via phone, it had a password, it turns out that HP had gotten his wife’s phone records!

What newspapers might have given us that the web hasn’t yet. All of my computer friends promise me agents that will do the kind of meta-information like things that will recreate the newspaper-like experience, we have torrents of information that’s not the same, like the front page of the New York Times. It’s very carefully crafted.

Why is the New York Times like the Metropolitan Opera? Average age is 60 and increasing by one a year.

Why are these stories not on the front page of the NYT? Sometimes acts of God. Too early. He wrote a story on the world wide web in 1993, he said think of it as a map to the buried treasure of information. When there was an explosion of economic activity I sulked for 5 years. Sometimes it’s Politics inside the NYT. He broke the Poindexter story twice, he was going to do Total Information Awareness. It got stuck on A-11, Washington Post did the story the next day but didn’t front it because the Times didn’t front it.